Deadline.

Paid consulting work and especially LIFE (no, not the magazine, don't get me started) have been holding up completion of This Private Plot, my third novel in the Oliver Swithin series. So it's clearly time to reconsider my priorities.

How do I know? Many kind friends (some of whom have actually read my stuff, and yet they're still friends) ask me constantly how the book is progressing. My reaction has just switched from delight at their interest to guilty irritation. This is a sign. There's only a week or two of editing to be done, the boys are back and settled in school, I have more available time on my calendar anyway, and no social life whatsoever.

So if I don't get the book shipped off to my agent by, oh, Halloween, you may come to my house dressed as a character from Harry Potter and kick me in the organ of your choice. (Just don't turn up empty handed. I like Grey Goose.)

Do I know how to set a deadline or what? And this, from a man whose distractibility is legend; a man indeed who was once described as a "productivity vacuum" -- and this was by somebody who liked me -- although I plead special circumstances at the time.